Lup Yuen Lee 李立源 @lupyuen@qoto.org

@thisisthebreath @lupyuen
Yeah of course! You can run PostmarketOS on it with the i3 window manager as well as Maemo Leste.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/index.php?title=Nokia_N900_(nokia-n900)&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop
https://leste.maemo.org/Getting_Started

@thisisthebreath @lupyuen
Hi, I'm the person who wrote this article!
Yes it's still very much alive and well!! A new community maintains the system, which now includes support for a lot of new devices such as the Motorola Droid 3/4 (with calls working) and the PinePhone.

@lupyuen This is why I was skeptical about the #Pinephone and I keep being skeptical.

The Pinephone is an amazing idea, free and open Linux phones are what everybody needs.

But they released a product that ships hardware that is a decade old, something that nobody would use as their primary device, with even basic features like calls and Bluetooth often requiring extra tweaking.

They said "it's mostly to allow developers to build something against the ecosystem" (a sensible point), but then added "oh, btw, almost none of the modern software can run on it without glitches or sluggish performance".

And now we're like "oh, cool, actually this device can run quite well this Linux distro that was last released for a phone released 13 years ago!" - and I mean, I used to love #Maemo, I had it both on my Nokia 770 and Nokia N900, I used to build stuff on it, but I wouldn't invest my time today building software for a distro that hasn't been maintained in years and doesn't even ship systemd or at least OpenRC.

I fail to see the point of all this. It's not a product, it's not even an MVP, it's barely a PoC. It's more something that people would show off on their geek timelines when they receive it, maybe some would even embark the challenge of installing Arch or Manjaro on it, and then they'd just leave it in a drawer when they realize that it can't do that much for today's standards.

As a developer, I'd love to have a Linux device in my pocket and build lots of cool software on it, but if all I get is a device that can't even run a modern desktop environment then I won't even invest my development time on it.

@lupyuen wow maemo is still around? i had that on my nokia N900